


Got a Sugarcane

by innie



Series: Prince [3]
Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers (Comic), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-05-15 05:49:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14784689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: There have to be bumps in the road.





	Got a Sugarcane

**Author's Note:**

  * For [donutsweeper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/donutsweeper/gifts).



> Title, obviously, by Prince: "lover, I got a sugarcane / That I want to lose in you."
> 
> My thanks to musesfool for the beta! And thanks to my recipient, donutsweeper, for prompting me to continue my Prince series - I'd missed writing these guys!

Jake was feeling particularly pleased with himself as he worked out that morning. The big bed he and Cougs had devised by pushing together their shitty twins and doing some creative work with fitted sheets had still held vestiges of Cougar's body heat and Jake had rolled into it, face down, grunting and wallowing like a pig in mud. Nothing was as good as being in bed with his own personal sexy beast, but finding traces that confirmed it wasn't all just some fever dream was sincerely gratifying. And he wasn't gonna pout about Cougs not lolling around, waiting for him to wake up; Cougs had important shit to do and that big brain of his didn't let him sleep more than a couple of hours a night anyway. 

Plus, Jake had it on good authority - his sister and her equally traitorous child - that he was about as far as it was humanly possible to get from a cute sleeper. He drooled, he pushed his ass and random limbs into the air when he wasn't sprawling gracelessly, and he had the grabbiest hands this side of the known universe.

Even a run with a full pack couldn't shake the smile he got from remembering the feeling of the warm space where Cougar had been when he woke up. He never ran with headphones - he got his RDA and more of pop culture in all the rest of his waking hours - and he was aware of how his smile, which couldn't be explained away by a sweet jam, was freaking out everybody from colonels on down. Perfect time to bust out his mad-scientist laugh.

Cougs would've high-fived him for that at least, and he would've parlayed that touch into something even closer, but no one around looked the least bit appreciative. Fine. He'd go back to where he was wanted, then.

Of course, the house was empty when he got back, and now that Cougar had proved that his optimism wasn't completely idiotic - how could it be, when Cougs confirmed that he'd also had naughty naked thoughts about the two of them? - Jake decided to spin that into a positive too. He could shower for as long as he wanted, singing at the top of his lungs, and then he could make a breakfast that would add back every pound he'd just sweated off. He had to build reserves of energy for whenever Cougs came strolling through the door, after all.

*

That much breakfast might have been a mistake, though Jake wasn't going to blame the bacon for being that delicious, because the poor piggies couldn't exactly help it. Still, he was a little groggier, and much more silent, than he'd normally be when he was updating his homemade software.

Deep in his debugging zone, and possibly also in dreams about Cougar's arms and the way beads of sweat meandered down the softly shadowed ridges between his muscles, it took him a while to cotton on to the fact that he wasn't alone in the house anymore.

He set the laptop down once the automation took over and headed back to the kitchen. Clay was sitting at the table, his chair skidded back hard enough that the legs had made grooves in the crap-ass linoleum, his forehead pressed against the forearm resting on the edge of the pockmarked wood. Why Clay always made things difficult for himself was beyond Jake; anybody else would have crashed into a bed, but there Clay was, grumbling like a bear emerging from the warm pull of hibernation, rolling his head restlessly up and down his arm, and scratching absently at his chest.

"Up you get, Papa Bear," Jake chirped, reaching out a hand to haul Clay up by the back of his sweat-sodden white shirt. It didn't work, mostly because now that Clay lifted his head and rocked back, Jake could see that all the buttons had been sliced off the shirt, so all Jake was doing was pulling it tight against Clay's armpits. That couldn't feel all that great. Jake dropped his hand but it stole forward again when he caught sight of Clay's red-rimmed eyes, which were slitted against the fluorescent scream of his Hypercolor shirt.

Jake took the opportunity to sniff discreetly at his CO. Sweat and booze and perfume that might have started off nice on a lady's skin but now had the sweet stench of rotting garbage. Eau de Clay, familiar as could be. "C'mon, man, let's get you into bed," he said, flexing his hands to crack all his knuckles at once.

Clay's shove didn't send him reeling only because he'd braced himself to heave the grumpy bear up and he knew from toting Juniebelle around that weight mattered far less than willingness when it came to being carried. "You're getting nowhere near my bed," Clay said.

Jake rubbed at the hip that'd banged into something or the other and then held his hands up. "Sounds good to me, Colonel," he said, leaving Clay to get a crick in his neck and a kink in his spine.

*

Jake had planned on pouncing and pinning Cougs to the door of their room, but he was too worked up to wait in the house where Clay was still growling through a hangover and whatever ugliness was making him such a jackass on this particular fine day. That thing with the buttons was weird, right? Clay didn't usually carry a blade, and if he'd found a woman volatile enough to carry one of her own and steady enough to slice each button free, he should have been happier. Finding the female equivalent of Roque should've had Clay doing the pig-in-shit thing Jake'd been doing just that morning. 

He wanted Cougar to come explain it all to him. He wanted Cougar to kick Clay's ass for whatever that shit back there had been. He wanted Cougar to hold him down and wring an orgasm out of him by any and every means necessary.

There was no end to the list of things he wanted, but none of it was happening right at that moment. He needed to get out of his head.

*

Hat in hand, Cougs found him and kissed him so thoroughly he didn't even _want_ to find words to explain what had caused the knots in his stomach. Jake had his hands curled up in the insistent warmth of Cougar's thick hair, was savoring how it managed to be simultaneously heavy and mobile, like Cougs was a merman who was getting used to life out of water, when he heard the happy noises he was making into Cougar's mouth. Cougs pulled back, apparently charmed by his idiocy, and dropped a few quick, firm kisses on his lips.

"Querido?" he questioned softly.

"Kiss me again, mer-king."

Cougar rolled his eyes dramatically but proved himself to be not only dangerously competent but also disarmingly obliging. "I have you," Cougar assured him between light kisses along his jaw and across the hollow between his collarbones. Jake felt his knees quiver and he dropped to them while he still had a chance to pick his landing spot. The lush lawn cradled his knees as he walked forward on them so that Cougar's back was against the brick and Cougar's dark head was turned pure black by the depth of the shadow cast by the overhang. His fingers fumbled at Cougar's fly and when he drew his dick out, he just held it on the length of his tongue for a long moment before getting to work. Jake squinted up Cougar's leanly muscled form, sun in his eyes not nearly as dazzling as the view he was getting of undulating brown skin and Cougs's pink tongue.

Cougar clapped the hat on Jake's bobbing head and held him by the crown of it. Cougs's other hand fisted in the rumpled Hypercolor t-shirt, rucking it up and putting a weight between his shoulder blades. Jake felt like a million bucks with that hat on his head and his hands on Cougar's dancing hips, his throat relaxed and his mind quiet at last. "Amado," Cougs said on a long exhale and came. All Jake could do was lick his lips and smile.

*

"The Pooch is not involved in this," Pooch tried, but Clay was suddenly soliciting audience participation for his decrees. Jake stole a look at Roque; the XO's eyes were down but he was shaking his head with the smallest movements possible, like a too-tight bobblehead. 

"This affects the whole unit," Clay said again. "DADT -"

"Nope," Jake said. "No way is that gonna be the _one_ regulation this team respects."

"DADT is the law, soldier," Clay said, breathing heavily like they were trekking up a mountain and the air was getting thin. That was what twenty-five years of smoking got him. "And what the hell you're playing at, when I need my sniper and my hacker focused on the job and not on each other's dicks, is a mystery to me."

"Oh, _shit_ ," Pooch said, and Roque smacked the flat of his foot-long knife's blade against his own thigh and got to his feet in a fighting stance. Jake was waiting for him to say something, so it startled him when it was Cougar's voice he heard, that quiet murmur hardened so that it couldn't be mistaken, each word a clean shot.

"You do not have me."

Roque was nodding now. "This is a _team_. We have each other's backs, bro. Ain't like they're sucking dicks in the middle of a firefight." Jake couldn't keep his eyes off the blade twirling in Roque's big hands. "Shit, is Pooch suspect 'cause he's got a wife? Does that mean his head ain't in the game?"

Pooch squared his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest, which was expanding like Popeye's biceps, post-spinach. Jake was finally seeing what Jolene must have figured out ages ago, and it was throwing him for a serious loop. Cougar's pinky finger linking with his own restarted his brain. And his mouth.

"You want to talk about risky behavior, we can talk all day about your Bad Idea Jeans and the ladies who tear them off you." He buttoned his lip before he could say anything about the Roques who would've done the same without needing to be liquored up first; not even Roque expected Clay to figure out who he really wanted in the next decade or so, and it wasn't Jake's revelation to share.

Clay looked surprised to be on the losing side of the argument. 

"Boss," Cougs said, his voice perfectly level, and Jake held his breath to hear him. "You want me to go, I go. You want me to stay, I stay." 

Clay couldn't seem to drag his eyes away from where Cougar's slim hand was entwined with Jake's, and Jake clutched him closer, gaining strength.

"What's it gonna be, Clay?" Jake asked, right when Roque prompted their fearless leader with a delicate, "Hey, shithead?" that was still nicer than it had to be.

Clay looked at all of them, some kind of understanding dawning on his face. He shook his head, surrendering with a frown. "I won't be asking or telling."

"But you will be granting leave," Pooch said, laying down the law like a boss. "The Pooch has a wife to see." Dollars to donuts he'd have Jolene shining with a pregnancy glow before he came back to base.

"And these two got sisters with kids," Roque chipped in, like the biggest, baddest Jiminy Cricket around. Clay just scrubbed a hand over his face, the rasp of his stubble loud against his palm, and nodded tiredly.

When Jake looked sideways at Cougar, he had his dark, endless eyes on Roque and Roque looked back and nodded, like he was just biding his time. Clay might not be much of a prize, but that was what Roque had wanted for as long as Jake had known him, and Jake made it a personal policy never to get between a knife-wielding man and what he was after.

*

There was no logical route that linked his sister and Cougs's, so they flipped a coin to see who they'd be descending on first. Jake might have fibbed about the coin landing on tails because he was positively itching to be surrounded by people who looked at Cougar and saw so much more than just a sniper. And fine, yes, he was maybe a little eager to have a bed of their own – a bed _built_ for two – that wasn't in Jules's house, since his sister's crush on Cougs was nearly as fervent as his own. Cougar looked at him like all of those thoughts were plain as day on his face, and smiled, just a little. Cougs was really laying the strong-and-silent thing on thick.

He laughed when Jake did his best to kiss the breath out of him.

The next morning, Jake woke up under a patchwork quilt Cougar's sister had pieced together from her kids' baby clothes with Cougs's cheek pressed against his heart and the ends of Cougar's hair tickling at his skin. Heaving a sigh of ridiculous contentment, he gathered Cougs up and cuddled him even closer. And, oh, good things came to those who waited – or those who jumped in without a plan when the man of their dreams offered them the world on a sexy, badass stick – because Jake discovered that when he was relaxed, Cougar, Mr. Trappist Monk himself, talked in his sleep. He sounded like he was having a whole delightful conversation by himself, and Jake exerted himself to stretch to his utmost limit and hook the handle of his laptop case with his big toe and get both his recording software and Google Translate up and running without jostling Cougar out of his happy sleep.

Hopefully Cougs would say something really juicy, something Jake could lord over him and cough into his hand whenever Cougar made that slightly pained face at one of his shirts. There was a flood of slurred, ridiculously hot Spanish that he couldn't even begin to figure out how to transcribe when Cougar's lips were shaping the words against his skin, and then, more clearly, he heard, "T'amo, t'quiero." Startled, he looked away from the laptop screen to drown in the honey of Cougar's one visible eye, smiling up at him.

"You weren't sleep-talking," he said, wanting to be disappointed, but his body couldn't figure out how to be when Cougar was on top of him and starting to rock all that pliant heat against his morning wood.

"No, cariño. Planning our next few hours," Cougar said, smiling sweetly while his hips did their wicked work.

"I do love a man with a plan," Jake said, and thrust up.


End file.
